Return to New Orleans

I was four hours into a 14-hour drive back to Slidell, La., and I still wasn't sure why I chose to return to a town ravaged by Hurricane Katrina, the storm whose aftermath sent me scrambling back home to Batavia after living like a vagabond for five days.

But something about the ghastly images on TV, mixed with the magical memory of any French Quarter street corner jazz player my ears ever heard, pulled me back into the driver's seat of my Jetta.

I packed back up my belongings, filled up with bottled water, and cranked the engine. My mom cried. My dad tried to talk me out of it.

I had to see my town again with my own eyes. To verify the horror flickering on the TV screen back in Batavia. In the storm’s aftermath I wasn’t privy to what was actually happening around me. We were in a blackout, huddled around a boom box, listening by candlelight to the only media lifeline left to the area – a radio station powered by a generator. The reports were based on rumor at best, but without any gas to drive anywhere, there was no way to know the true devastation that surrounded us.

Reports said Mandeville was ravaged, but it was a mere pinch compared to the slap Katrina delivered in neighboring towns, including Slidell, the town where I work just west of Mandeville. I had to know for sure. I had to see the true destruction, write about it, document it. People on the outside needed to know.

Today, four weeks after driving straight into the gut of America's worst natural disaster in its history, I recall contemplating my return as I sat on the deserted, sun-kissed banks of Lake Pontchartrain, just north of New Orleans. I got up, checked the batteries in my tape recorder, and hit the field. I wondered out loud if my journey back to Mandeville would be worth it.

I would soon find out.

Slidell is non-existent. Boats litter the streets. The homes of subjects I once interviewed and became friendly with over the years are reduced to a heap of splinters. I have no idea where they are. Toward the bayou, you can turn in 360 degrees and see nothing but a graveyard of flattened million-dollar homes.

A lone u-haul truck towers out of the rubble, far away from any road. Every once in a while you’ll see someone in knee-high rubber boots and work gloves rifling through the debris. Most of the resident have accepted their loss and moved on. To where, I have no idea.

Many traffic lights are still out, making driving similar to chancing a gauntlet of speeding metal bullets. The economy is suffering. Businesses are open only a few hours at a time, and owners are scrambling to fill a workforce. Teenagers are taking jobs in record numbers.

When you see an open store, it’s as if you’ve discovered the lost city of Atlantis filled with gold artifacts. Within hours, stock is wiped out by a mob of seemingly crazed zombies. The doors close, and owners usher the lines away, some trying their best to ignore the spitting nails of profanities. It’s getting better, if only slightly.

It seemed I had driven into a vortex, an inverse world of everything Slidell once stood for. The streets are clean, but the people aren’t. In 12 hours, Katrina left a cut so deep everyone will be walking with a limp for years.

The economy is suffering. Businesses are only open a few hours at a time and owners are scrambling to fill a workforce. Teenagers are taking jobs in record numbers.

The schools just reopened last week. After the military cleaned them up, only four remain uninhabitable. Salmen High School, in the heart of Slidell, still has a foot and a half deep mud caked in every corner. Hundreds of dead fish litter the halls. A live alligator was caught thrashing in a computer lab. The water marks – seven feet high – in the halls tell the tale of devastation.

The smell makes you want to vomit. The individual stories make you want to cry. The resolve of those pushing forward makes you want to pick up a hammer and pound away, rebuilding anything around you. I started to realize why I was here.

Those stories need to be told.

This is a continuation of an article written by McMicken alum Matthew Penix. The original article is available on the A&S website

.

Alumnus Matt Penix is a reporter for Slidell Sentry-News.